Gamebooks

*sigh*, who do they fuck with things? Blogger has changed its settings and I am now forced to deal with them. Not a good sign when it took me two minutes to find the NEW POST button. Nor can I actually seem to VIEW my own blog. Wonderful.

Nevetheless, this post is about Gamebooks. A few weeks ago I stumbled across an old copy of Steve Jackson's Island of Lizard King buried in the back of my bookself. When I was younger I had played through the Way of the Tiger series and some of the Lone Wolf books. I had a few other Steve Jackson gamebooks, but don't remember if I played them as much. I am now looking to change that and have already started peaking into ebay and dug into a few second hand shops.

I'm also very eager to get my hands on THIS.

Since I'm working on a solo-game meself, I started digging around to see what the status of Gamebooks are in the intraweb and I was pleasently surprised to see that its doing okay. Its also nice to see that many of these games are being reissued (some as apps, which is neat) or being put up as freeware, which means I now have a decent cache stored on my zip drive.

BLOGS and Stuff

Turn to 400
Adventure Cow - write your own!
Fabled Land
Llyod of Gamebooks

Free Stuff!

Abandonia-Gamebooks
Project Aon - all the Lone Wolf books, free!

Then last night I discovered Heart of Ice by David Morris, an post-apok setting gamebook available for FREE and loaded it onto my ereader. As fortune rolled, there was a mix up at my chemo this morning and I ended up waiting around for two hours while the pharmacy caught up. Since it doesn't need dice to play,  I loaded up Heart of Ice and ran a game. Poor Mike the Mutant, he was doing pretty well until he started exploring the Ancient Pyramid of Giza and accidentally triggered an ancient nuclear failsafe that caused the destruction of the pyramid and I am assuming, a few square miles of frozen Sahara. Hey, if you gotta go, at least it has style.

I'm thinking of finding a dice-app that will work on my cell phone so I can try out some of the other games in similar situations. No one comments if you're jotting notes in a pad, but dice weirds some people out.

I intend fo try HoI again, which as I said is great because it doesn't need dice. But up next, my happy find for the month, my own, slightly batterd second hand copy of Warlock of Fire Mountain!